Foer's taken a three-year respite from writing fiction to probe the question of whether we should eat animals -- with this research and writing task triggered by his meditation on what to feed his first child.

If you eat meat from factories you have not absorbed the reality of factory farms. If you truly understood what happens inside these windowless animal jails and abattoirs, you simply would not eat this meat.

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals is a triple marvel: the research is serious and far reaching, the writing clear, clever, accessible and in a few instances graphically ingenious, and the cause is genuinely important.